"Alliterative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of The British Weekly, it is enough to point to such alliterative and melodious combinations as "Rambling Remarks" and "Claudius Clear." The theological attitude of the paper presents difficulties which are not so easy to overcome, but Mr. Pullar Leggatt has promised to deal with this question later ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... some wiser people, was the more pleased with his formula that it had an alliterative sound. Nevertheless, Ralph was master from this time until the spelling-school came. If only it had not been for that spelling-school! Many and many a time after the night of the fatal spelling-school Ralph used to say, "If only it had ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... letter by letter. Of these one has a name which—risking due castigation if I betray gross ignorance by the supposition—I think he must certainly have himself bestowed on it, as it excels the most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "Green-Room Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt; A Gallimaufry got up to guile Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments; Gathered and Garnished by Gridiron Gabble, Gent., Godson ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... by a cannibal tribe, offers in addition to alliterative possibilities in the headline department, a certain novelty particularly appealing to the English reader who loves above all things to have a shock or two with his breakfast bacon. England was shocked to its depths by the ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... some set-back, within four years of the time when Banneker's introductory editorial appeared, the paper would have eclipsed all former records. In less than two years it had climbed to third place, and already Banneker's salary, under the percentage agreement, was, in the words of the alliterative Gardner, whose article describing The House With Three Eyes and its owner had gone forth on the wings of a far-spreading ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... alliterative romance, entitled the Morte Arthure, published from a manuscript in Lincoln Cathedral by Mr. Halliwell,[3] is considered by Sir F. Madden to be the veritable gest of Arthure composed by Huchowne. ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... Luminary Extinguishing Noxious Gas (etched from the design of another artist); and two admirable designs bearing the titles of Vis-a-Vis and Les Graces. The same year we meet with one of the earliest of his alliterative satires, afterwards so frequently to be seen among the famous illustrations to the "Comic Almanack": La Belle Assemblee, or Sketches of Characteristic Dancing, miscellaneous groups, comprising in all thirty figures (exclusive of the orchestra), engaged in a ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... important or superfluous to note that this oral literature had, in the Teutonic countries and in England more especially, an immense influence (hitherto not nearly enough allowed for by literary historians) in the great change from a stressed and alliterative to a quantitative and rhymed prosody, which took place, with us, from about 1200 A.D. Accustomed as were the ears of all to quantitative (though very licentiously quantitative) and rhymed measures in the hymns and services of the Church—the one literary exercise to which gentle ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... all the world has admired in Aristotle and Plato. Moreover, they were from the first confronted with a practical difficulty from which the Greek critics were so fortunate as to be free. Was rhyme a "brutish" form of verse? and, if so, was its place to be taken by the alliterative rhythm, so dear to the older poets, or by an importation of classical metres, such as was attempted by Sidney and Spenser, and enforced by the unwearied lectures of Harvey and of Webbe? This, however technical, was ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... have suggested his theme, for he inveighs not only against the laity, but especially against the ecclesiastics for their neglect of the poor. The poem is remarkable for being without rhythm, but alliterative, such as was common in the neighbouring district of Wales. It somewhat resembles one of the old "Mysteries," introducing a variety of allegorical characters. Some of the personifications are ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the Rabbinical proverbs, are essentially poetical. Some, indeed, are either expanded metaphors or metaphors touched by genius into poetry. The alliterative proverbs and maxims of the Talmud and Midrash are less easily illustrated. Sometimes they enshrine a pun or a conceit, or depend for their aptness upon an assonance. In some of the Talmudic proverbs there is a spice of cynicism. ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... from this, though belonging to the same group, those of which the characteristic feature is not this internal likeness with initial unlikeness, but initial likeness with internal unlikeness; not rhyming, but strongly alliterative, and in every case with a change of the interior vowel from a weak into a strong, generally from i into a or o; as 'shilly-shally', 'mingle-mangle', 'tittle-tattle', 'prittle-prattle', 'riff-raff', 'see-saw', 'slip-slop'. No one who is not quite out of ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... retired and the politician took command of Dr. Nesbit's soul. And he gave thought to the Nesbit machine. The job of the moment before the machine was to make George Brotherton, who had the strength of a man who belonged to all the lodges in town, mayor of Harvey. "Help Harvey Hump" was George's alliterative slogan, and the translation of the slogan into terms of Nesbitese was found in a rather elaborate plan to legalize the issuance of bonds by the coal and oil towns adjacent to Harvey, so that Daniel Sands could spin out his web of iron and copper and steel,—rails ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... portion of the cargo, which consisted of china. The rest of the crew being metaphorically as well as literally in the same boat, the consignee's agent, on the trow's arrival at Bristol, hinted at a more than alliterative connection between china and chests, which he was proceeding to search when Onions objected, very rightly urging that he had no warrant. "Is it a warrant you're wanting?" demanded the baffled agent. "Very well, we'll see if we cannot find one." With that he stepped ashore and hurried to ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... to Faithfulness (for no Translator is at liberty to misrepresent his Author and make an old Saxon Bard speak the Language of a modern Petit Matre) or from uniting English Words to express important Anglo-Saxon compounds.... Some may ask why I have not preserved the Anglo-Saxon alliterative Metre. My Reason is that I do not think the Taste of the English People would at present bear it. Iwish to get my book read, that my Countrymen may become generally acquainted with the Epic of our Ancestors ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... say unto you, that if ever mortal man or mortal mind needed rest, recreation, recuperation, and other alliterative things, that same man is now writing to the Lady Elizabeth Ellis, of Terraced Garden, in Camden, by the Wateree. And he is writing without hope that he will see the Lady and her Lord and the Princeling, for moons and moons. This is a sad, sad word for him to write. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... was a commonplace that dramatic movement and the filling up of scenes by the introduction of characters who propose pointless riddles to one another and explain at length what their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does not consist in disguising commonplace expressions in archaic and alliterative and extravagant dress; that Wotan displays no grasp of the essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy when he insists on dubbing Brunhilde ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... (prayer-house) and upstander. Even the domestic animals had special haaf appellations. This conception of the sea as filled with weird mysterious beings of unspeakable malignity, ever ready to whelm the boat of an unwary intruder, carries the mind back to the old alliterative lay of Beowulf, the contest of that hero with the wallowing ocean-monsters, and the grim subterranean glow in the sea-home of Grendel's mother. The Shetlanders have only too much reason to brood over the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Up to the ripe age of forty-two he had been joined to his idols. It is a proverb, that he who is a fool at forty will be a fool at fourscore; yet Mr. Cushing, who is certainly no fool, had been blind to the beauties of Original Democracy for a year or two beyond that alliterative era. The Whigs had just succeeded in electing their candidates, and it seemed as if nothing short of an almost Providential interposition could save him. That interposition came in the death of General Harrison, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... dimeter, freely altered by the licences of equivalence, anacrusis, and catalexis, though not recently practised in English when Christabel and the Lay set the example, is an inevitable result of the clash between accented, alliterative, asyllabic rhythm and quantitative, exactly syllabic metre, which accompanied the transformation of Anglo-Saxon into English. We have distinct approaches to it in the thirteenth century Genesis; it attains ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... is written in part in alliterative lines on the Anglo-Saxon system, in part in rhymed couplets of ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... only does this add powerfully to the archaic impressiveness and awe, but it also seems to bring the form and figure of the Sisters of Fate more closely within the circle of the Teutonic idea. I have pointed out this striking use of the alliterative system in Macbeth in an article on "An old German Poem and a Vedic Hymn," which appeared in Fraser in June, 1877, and in which the derivation of the Weird Sisters from ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... for the first time from a unique MS., wholly unknown to even the latest writers on the subject, and exhibits our national hero's life in a simpler form than even Geoffrey of Monmouth, or Layamon. The Early English Alliterative Poems, though noticed long ago by Dr. Guest and Sir F. Madden, for their great philological and poetical value, had been inaccessible to all but students of the difficult and faded MS. in the British Museum: they have ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... Highlands, where description runs so entirely into epithets and adjectives, as to render recitation breathless, and translation hopeless. Here, while we have retained the imagery, we have been unable to find room, or rather rhyme, for one half of the epithets in the original. The power of alliterative harmony in the original ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... English verse independently of French influence. From the twelfth century until the introduction of blank verse by the Elizabethans, practically all English verse, except that which belongs to the Alliterative Revival (mainly in the north of England) of the second half of ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... untrammelled nature. In Germany nature has got to behave herself, and not set a bad example to the children. A German poet, noticing waters coming down as Southey describes, somewhat inexactly, the waters coming down at Lodore, would be too shocked to stop and write alliterative verse about them. He would hurry away, and at once report them to the police. Then their foaming and their shrieking would ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... this a technical description of improvised alliterative verse, suggested by and wrought out on ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... those young authors who are coming before the public in the flutter of their first or early appearance, and are in the trembling delirium of stage-fright already. Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative Angelina's book of verses, I wish you would ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew. Exhortation addressed to the Christian Laity. Literal Translations of the Hymns of the Old Church:— 1. Deus qui cordi lumen es. 2. Aurora lucis rutilat. 3. Te Deum laudamus. The Song of Hildebrand and his son Hadubrand,—in alliterative metre. The Prayer from the Monastery of Wessobrun,—in alliterative metre. The ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... not expect to "leap with a single bound" into the society of those whom it is not flattery to call your betters. When "The Paetolian" has paid you for a copy of verses,—(I can furnish you a list of alliterative signatures, beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe Zenith,)—when "The Ragbag" has stolen your piece, after carefully scratching your name out,—when "The Nut-cracker" has thought you worth shelling, and strung the kernel of your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the whole of his work is a symphony of feeling, a song of Love, and forms a curious reaction against the exaltation of reason and logic in scholasticism. He wrote a large number of treatises and poems, both in Latin and English, lyrical songs and alliterative homilies, burning spiritual rhapsodies and sound practical sermons, all of which were widely known and read. Certain points about Rolle are of special interest and distinguish him from other mystics and seers. One is that for him the culminating mystical experience took the form of melody, ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... down in the corral one day, saddling Shylock—so named because he tried to exact a pound of flesh every time I turned my back or in other ways seemed off my guard—and when I was looping up the latigo I discovered that the alliterative Mr. Potter was roosting on the fence, watching me with those needle-pointed eyes of his. I wondered if he was about to prepare another report ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... The alliterative titles at once attracted the paragraphers; they fell upon them like hungry trout, and a perfect fusillade of paragraphs began. This is exactly what the editor wanted; and he followed these two series immediately by inducing ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... hundred and sixty chieftains were slain; only three escaped by flight, among whom was Aneurin, who afterwards commemorated the slaughter in the 'Gododin,' a lament for the dead. Ninety-seven of the stanzas remain. In various measures of alliterative and assonant verse they sing the praises of ninety of the fallen chiefs, usually giving one stanza to each hero. One of these stanzas is known to readers of Gray, who translated it under the name of 'The ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... serves to mark a step forward or back in the destiny of man. After a year, those months of petty detail might be wiped out entirely without changing the general trend of events—and such a time was the winter that saw "Dill and Bill," as one alliterative mind called them, in possession of the Double-Crank. The affairs of the ranch moved smoothly along toward a more systematic running than had been employed under Brown's ownership. Dill settled more and more into the new life, so that he was so longer looked upon as a foreign element; ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... were volumes of the early English poets, an album, and A Souvenir of Friendship, in red and gold, like the Hemans. She opened the souvenir, and looked idly at the small, exquisitely fine steel engravings, the alliterative verses, the tales of sentiment beginning with long preambles couched in choicest English. She shut the book with a little weary sigh, and looked irresolutely at her sleeping aunt, then at the ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... but, for dear recollection's sake of days gone by, intend it at least to be spared from malicious incremation. Records of roamings in romantic youth, witnesses of wayward way-side wanderings, gayly with alliterative titles might your contents, a la Roscoe, be set forth. But—what conceivable news can be told at this time of day about the trampled Continent, and the crowded British isles? Had my luck led me to Lapland or Formosa, to Mexico or Timbuctoo, to the top ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... curious, they were never known to ask a question. And there would have been no trouble had not a free lance in the shape of the model-woman come into the land on the first ice, with a spanking dog-team and a cosmopolitan reputation. Loraine Lisznayi—alliterative, dramatic, and Hungarian—precipitated the strife, and because of her Mrs. Eppingwell left her hillside and invaded Freda's domain, and Freda likewise went up from the town to spread confusion and embarrassment at the ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... The Alliterative Romance of the Death of King Arthur; now first printed, from a Manuscript in the Library of Lincoln Cathedral. Seventy-five Copies ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... By similar strain of alliterative classification, Mrs. Schum's boarding house might have been indexed as Middle West, middle class, medium price, and meager ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... American gentleman, tiring of storing up his treasures only in heaven, would send a can or a case or a shipload of baked beans to the Belgians. This is alliterative, but earnest. They can heat them in the trenches in the cans; they can thrive on them and fight on them. And when the cans are empty they can build fires in them or hang them, filled with stones, on the barbed-wire ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... an incredibly efficient quartermaster. Possibly the same qualities make for success in law and quartermastering. His gaiety was the mask for a most unsleeping energy and very great ability. He was once dubbed, by a person more alliterative than observant, 'a frail, flitting figure with a fly-flap.' Yet he had taken over Brodie's job, at Sannaiyat, when that experienced 'quarter' had wakened suddenly to find that an aeroplane bomb had wounded him. Within a year of this event I was privileged to be present at an ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... Saxon verse was regulated by syllabic accent or emphasis, and not by quantity, like the classical metres. Alliteration, or the use of several syllables in the same stanza beginning with the same letter, takes the place of rhyme. The alliterative metres and the strained and figurative diction common to the Anglo-Saxon poets was common to the Northmen, and seems to have ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... perceived that this liveliest of evening journals was not going to be left behind by the Globe in providing the public with particulars of the latest sensation. Under the heading of "A Motor Pirate," with descriptive headlines extending across a couple of columns, and as attractively alliterative as the cunning pen of a smart sub-editor could make them, was the account of a similar incident. At first I thought it must be the same occurrence, but a brief perusal showed me that this impression was ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... century (between 814 and 840) for the purpose of familiarizing the lately converted Saxons with the life of Christ. Nothing is known of the author except that he was a learned cleric who had some skill in handling the old alliterative verse, which had now nearly run its course. A few verses are lacking at the end of the poem, which breaks off, with the story nearly all told, at line 5983. The name 'Heliand,' Old Saxon for 'Savior,' was given to the poem by Schmeller, who edited it in 1830. ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... alliterative sentences for all the letters of the alphabet, and many others more or less alliterative, while the humorous papers contain many exaggerated examples of this sort of thing. Of the last, the following on "Hottentottentaten" will serve as ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... conjunction is euphoniously alliterative at least, if not a consistent consequence; yet who more fit to perform at the funeral as the undertaker who alone has got the hearse and mules all ready for the job? Cobden, who has denounced—more still, has passed sentence upon—the colonies, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... pleasantly alliterative one in which he makes the spider, "from the silent ambush of his den," "feel far off the trembling of his thread," show that he was beginning to study the niceties of verse, instead of trusting wholly to what he would have called ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... to Wales which defaces his account of contemporary Ireland. He was acquainted with Welsh, though he does not seem to have preached it, and another archdeacon acted as the interpreter of Archbishop Baldwin's Crusade sermon in Anglesea. But he could appreciate the charm of the Cynghanedd, the alliterative assonance which is still the most distinctive feature of Welsh poetry. He cannot conceal his sympathy with the imperishable determination of his countrymen to keep alive the language which is their differentia among the nations of the world. It ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... Chopin's funeral march on the pipe organ, who would deliver the eulogy and just what leading advertiser they would send around to the Eagle, his hated contemporary, to get the Murdocks to print the eulogy in full and on the first page! Henry employs an alliterative head writer on the Beacon, and we wondered whether he had decided to use "Wichita Weeps," or "State Stands Sorrowing." If he used the latter, it would make two lines and that would require a deck head. We could not decide, so we began talking of ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... simply on the alliterative principle mentioned by J.M.B. (Vol. i., p. 475.) as common to many popular proverbs, &c. Two others I subjoin from my own recollection, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... only by Poe. He had the high moral purpose of the artist- prophets; but his efforts after musical effects, as well as his untimely death, prevented the full fruitage of his admirable genius. Many of the poems that he has left us are lacking in spontaneity and artistic finish. Alliterative effects are sometimes obtrusive. His poetic theories, as presented in The Science of English Verse, often outstripped his execution. But, after all these abatements are made, it remains true that in a few pieces he has reached a trembling height ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... called The Times, remains a mystery. To-day would have been better; that is, if by The Times is only meant "The Present Day." And if it doesn't mean this, what meaning has it? For alliterative advertisement it may be useful; e.g., "Times at TERRY's." The dialogue generally is easy, natural ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... wight that hath discrecioun Hath herd somewhat or all of his fortune. There are two considerable fragments of an English alliterative romance on the subject written in the west midland dialect, and dating from the second half of the 14th century. The first, The Gestes of the Worthy King and Emperor Alisaunder of Macedoine (ed. W. W. Skeat, E.E.T.S., 1877, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in Sense and Sensibility the sense of Elinor, and the sensibility (or rather sensiblerie) of Marianne, are markedly emphasised in the opening pages of the book But Miss Austen subsequently, and, as we think, wisely, discarded in her remaining efforts the cheap attraction of an alliterative title. Emma and Persuasion, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, are names far more in consonance with the quiet tone of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... public would say so. And then, with respect to Ab Gwilym, had I not done as much justice to him as to the Danish Ballads; not only rendering faithfully his thoughts, imagery and phraseology, but even preserving in my translation the alliterative euphony which constitutes one of the most remarkable features of Welsh prosody? Yes, I had accomplished all this; and I doubted not that the public would receive my translations from Ab Gwilym with quite as much eagerness ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... temporary powers of life, and on such occasions the extreme force of the apparatus has ever received the highest praise. The Syncretic march of mind rectifies the above error—with them, weakness is strength. Fancy the alliterative littleness of a "Stephens" and a "Selby," as the tools from which the drama must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... somewhere seen a volume with the alliterative title of "Poets of Portsmouth," in which are embalmed no ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... called the Daily Chronicle. I think my writing to the Daily Chronicle was an act of pure wilfulness. In fact, I feel sure it was. I quite forget what they said. I believe they said that Dorian Gray was poisonous, and I thought that, on alliterative grounds, it would be kind to remind them that, however that may be, it is at any rate perfect. That was all. Of the other two hundred and thirteen criticisms I have taken no notice. Indeed, I have not read more than half of them. It is a sad thing, but one ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... get any light from these quotations, and we should be glad to have been spared the doubt as to Mr. Lowell's accuracy and authority as a verbal critic suggested by his off-hand emendation of a phrase which he has remembered for its alliterative sweetness while he has missed its sense and forgotten the context. In the line "Fayre Venice," etc., which occurs not at the beginning, but near the end, of the sonnet, "lost" would be so contradictory to the sense that any editor who had found the word ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... books, but was not entirely surprised to read, in glaring head-lines, "The Wage-Worker's Weapon," followed by some vehement lines denunciatory of capital, monopoly, "pampered palates in palatial homes, boodle-burdened, beer-bloated legislators," etc., the sort of alliterative and inflammatory composition which, distributed in the columns of the papers of the Alarm and Arbeiter Zeitung stamp, was read aloud over the evening pipes and beer to knots of applauding men, mostly tramps and idlers, in a thousand groggeries throughout the bustling ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... life of St. Etheldred of Ely refers twice, with a certain pride, to a manuscript preserved in the abbey of Godstow which he himself has seen and from which he has drawn some of the facts which he presents. The translator of the alliterative romance of Alexander "borrowed" various books when he undertook his English rendering.[30] Earl Rivers, returning from the Continent, brought back a manuscript which had been lent him by a French gentleman, and set about the translation of his Dictes and Sayings ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... pedantic, pompous, stilted; orotund; high flown, high flowing; sententious, rhetorical, declamatory; grandiose; grandiloquent, magniloquent, altiloquent[obs3]; sesquipedal[obs3], sesquipedalian; Johnsonian, mouthy; bombastic; fustian; frothy, flashy, flaming. antithetical, alliterative; figurative &c. 521; artificial &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in rude alliterative verse (for rhyme was introduced in England only after the Norman Conquest), is the most valuable old English manuscript in the British Museum. Although much damaged by fire, it has been carefully studied by learned men. They have patiently ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... face. He had thought her name suited her, and wondered what dignified appellation had been edited, cut, and metamorphosed to make "Tommy," deciding after a look at the passenger list that it was Thomasina, and that the girl must be Miss Thomasina Tucker, an alliterative combination which did not appeal to his ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... position as a musical director at a theatre. I had never had an opportunity of judging of his gifts in this line. He had always refused to play the piano in my presence, but I had seen his setting of an alliterative poem of his own, Die Walkure, which, though rather awkwardly put together, struck me by its precise and skilful compliance with the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... very old Anglo-Saxon romance consisting of 6356 short alliterative lines, and the oldest extant in the language, recording the exploits of a mythical hero of the name, who wrestled Hercules-wise, at the cost of his life, with first a formidable monster, and then a dragon that had to be exterminated or tamed into submission ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... mere pleasure excursions. Mr. Lowell says, facetiously, that "They are peripatetic picnic parties, faintly flavored with piety; just a sufficient suspicion of it to render them acceptable to the easy-going gods." Beneath this light alliterative style, which delights the literary reader, do we find the truth? To me it seems like a slur on the pilgrims, evidently due to Mr. Lowell's idea that a genuine religious feeling must be gloomy and solemn. Joy may seem to him incompatible with heartfelt religion and aspiration. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... all very well, so Cigarette's philosophy had always reckoned; a chocolate bonbon, a firework, a bagatelle, a draught of champagne, to flavour an idle moment. "Vin et Venus" she had always been accustomed to see worshipped together, as became their alliterative; it was a bit of fun—that was all. A passion that had pain in it had never touched the Little One; she had disdained it with lightest, airiest contumely. "If your sweetmeat has a bitter almond in it, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... investigation of the subject led him in the "Walkuere" to picture Brunhilde's guilt and punishment, and finally in the "Rheingold" a psychological foundation for the whole. The work took this mental shape as early as 1851. Two years later, the poem, for which he had chosen the alliterative style of the Edda as the only suitable form, was given to his friends, and in 1863 to the world. From that time his sole ambition was to bring this first all-comprehensive German national drama into life by having it performed as a distinct festival-play far from the everyday theatre. Nearly ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... were replacing the classical metres which, so far as syllables were concerned, had hitherto been adhered to. As we advance into the sixth and seventh centuries, we find English monks attempting to reproduce the characteristics of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in Latin; and at the Court of Charlemagne we find an Irish monk writing Latin verse in a long trochaic line, which is ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore |
